Françoise Nielly, 1960 | Palette Knife painter

Françoise Nielly is a French knife-painter who is famous for painting vibrant and colourful closeup portraits of people such as Barack Obama. She was born in Marseille, brought up near Cannes and Saint-Tropez and is now living in Paris.

Francoise Nielly lives in a world of images.

She has explored the different facets of "image" all her life, through painting, photography, roughs, illustrations and virtual, computer generated animated graphics. It is clear now that painting is her direction and her passion.

She gets her sense of space and construction from her father, who was an architect. Growing up in the South of France where she lived between Cannes and Saint-Tropez, is never far from the light, the color sense and the atmosphere that permeates the South of France.

This is coupled with her studies with her studies at the Beaux arts and Decorative Arts, and her sense of humor and of celebration.

Françoise Nielly's painting is expressive, exhibiting a brute force, a fascinating vital energy. Oil and knife combine tsculpt her images from a material that is , at the same time, biting and incisive, charnel and sensual. Whether she paints the human body or portraits, the artist takes a risk : her painting is sexual, her colors free, exuberant, surprising, even explosive, the cut of her knife incisive, her color pallet dazzling.

Françoise Nielly is a passionate woman who loves life, wide open spaces, sushi, blue lagoons, the Internet, humor, books, Paris, New-York and Vancouver. Resolutely inscribed in her epoch, she is an accomplished artist ; 20 years of artistic expression explain the maturity of her work and the perfect mastery of her art.

She lives and paints in Paris near Montmartre; shows and sells her work in Europe, in Canada and in the United States.

Françoise Nielly è un’artista francese, nata a Marsiglia. Una passione per la pittura e per i colori. Non a caso si definisce “Miss Fluo”.

Françoise ritrae volti celebri e non, utilizzando colori forti e una tecnica al tempo stesso grezza e sofisticata, spontanea e complessa: i colori ad olio di cui si serve vengono spalmati, o meglio “raschiati” sulla tela con una spatola metallica, che rende così una “pennellata” aggressiva, dirompente, esuberante.

Il particolare taglio fotografico e l’espressività delle sue opere sono una caratteristica distintiva che ha permesso a Françoise di affermare la propria arte in tutto il mondo.